First week on a backend team. The codebase looked like Express. It wasn't. Someone had built an entire framework on top of it. Undocumented, untested.
Services, repositories, dependency injection, validation. All hand-rolled. They'd reinvented half of NestJS, just without the docs, the tests, or the conventions. "We don't need a framework" doesn't mean you won't build one.
The next backend, I used NestJS from day one. Same team velocity in week 1. Dramatically faster by month 3. New engineers read the docs instead of reverse-engineering knowledge.
(In the AI era, this matters more. Coding agents actually understand NestJS conventions, you can even think of a CLEAN architecture.)
"No framework" is still a framework choice. It's just the most expensive one.
I'm not sure that first team would agree with me. But I've seen the cost of both approaches now, and I'd make the same call every time.